“No.” Jennifer gave him a wounded look. “Some of it’s pointlessly elaborate ’80s references.”

Laughing, he hugged her. “Happy birthday, darling. Just no Twister and no Pokémon.”

“How do you feel”—her eyes glinted—“about Pogs?”

He glanced at me. “I’m sorry, Lucien. These are my friends. I’m not exactly sure how that happened.”

“Hey,” protested Jennifer. “It’s my birthday. If I want to dress up like an idiot and make you all eat prawn cocktail in celebration of the decades that spawned me, that’s my choice, and you will damn well support it.”

“You could have at least warned me. I’ve been trying to convince this man I’m cool.”

She sighed. “Oh, Oliver. Even when the word ‘cool’ was cool, cool people didn’t use it.”

While she was completely right, I felt I should at least try to defend my ambiguously fake boyfriend from his definitely real friends. “Not true. Bart Simpson said ‘cool.’”

“Bart Simpson was a fictional ten-year-old,” pointed out the man who had failed to Rocher correctly. Brian, was it?

“I’m not sure,” Oliver interjected, “I’m comfortable being compared to Bart Simpson.”

I was probably going to get dumped. But there was really no other response. “Don’t have a cow, man,” I said, at exactly the same time everybody else did.

“You know”—Oliver put his arm around my waist—“Lucien was concerned that he wouldn’t have anything in common with you. He clearly failed to account for the fact that mocking me is everybody’s favourite pastime.”

Jennifer snuck a curious look at me. “Were you, Luc? We were all worried we were going to scare off another of Oliver’s boyfriends.”

“We don’t scare them off.” This was Brian, again, in the too jolly tone of someone about to be slightly more insulting than he intends to be.“Oliver does.”

“I’ll admit”—Oliver had tensed up beside me so I thought it was a good moment to launch myself into the conversation—“that the evening gown did throw me. But I’m totally here for a…a…whatever this is.”

Jennifer thought about it for a moment. “Well, I’m not quite sure what it is, actually. It’s a sort of celebration of things eight-year-old me thought thirty-year-old me would have in the future. Except I thought we’d be having this party on the moon.”

“Now then.” Peter clapped his hands in a hosty kind of way. “Can I get either of you a drink? We’ve got Lambrini, Bacardi Breezers, Cointreau, some things that are actually nice. And Amanda’s in the kitchen with mead.”

I blinked. “Did I miss the ’90s mead boom?”

“We’re reenactors,” explained Brian. “We never don’t bring mead. Also they didn’t say which ’90s.”

Oliver drifted over to one of the sofas and drew me down next to him. “I’ll have one of the things that are actually nice.”

“You”—I poked his knee—“are not in the spirit. What flavour breezers do you have?”

Peter perked up. “Good question. I think…some pink ones? And maybe some orange ones? And possibly a slightly different orange one that might be peach?”

“I’ll take the slightly different orange one.”

“Coming right up. And I’ll see what’s happened to Amanda.”

“And Peter,” cried Jennifer, “bring the vol-au-vents. Or is it vols-au-vent?”

“I think technically…” A woman, who looked remarkably like Brian, apart from the beard—as in Brian had the beard, not the woman—appeared in the doorway “…it would be volent-au-vent. Because vol-au-vent is from the French ‘to fly in the wind.’ And so the plural would be ‘they fly in the wind,’ which would be ‘ils volent au vent.’”

The conversation ricocheted off the way conversations between people who’ve known each other far too long tend to. And even though I didn’t know what the “infamous digger incident” was or what happened at Amanda’s twenty-eighth, I felt surprisingly un-left-out. I mean, I did go through a short routine of emotional gymnastics, remembering how I’d freaked out when we’d gone to dinner with Alex and Miffy, and being slightly protective of the closeness I had with Oliver in private. Especially since he tended to be so buttoned up and polite in public. But, actually, it was nice to see him happy and relaxed, and surrounded by people who cared about him.

Eventually the doorbell rang, and Peter took up his Fererro Rocher station. I assumed this was going to be some people I hadn’t met because I’d had a message from Bridge saying she was five minutes away, which meant she’d be at least another hour. Voices drifted in from the corridor.

“God, sorry we’re late,” boomed somebody about two shades posher than me and three shades less posh than Alex. “The twins were absolute shits. Shit, by the way, being the operative… Oh monsieur, with this Rocher you’re really spoiling us.”

“Suck it, Brian.” That was probably Peter.

“Please,” continued the posh man, “for Christ’s sake, bring me some alcohol. And be careful when you’re hanging up my jacket. I think one of the little bastards threw up on it.”

“I told you when they were born”—another stranger, a woman this time—“we should have left them on a hillside overnight and kept whichever one survived.”

There was a flapping of coats and a shuffling of shoes, and Jennifer and Peter came back into the room, followed by a surprisingly dapper man in a plum waistcoat and a small, round woman in a polka-dot lindy-hop dress.

Oliver—who wasn’t so relaxed as to forget his manners—stood to greet them. “Ben, Sophie, this is Luc—he’s my boyfriend. Luc, this is Ben, who’s a stay-at-home dad, and Sophie, who is Satan.”

“I’m not Satan,” she huffed. “I’m Beelzebub at worst.”

“Jennifer?” Oliver made a slightly imperious gesture. “Who was your last client?”

Sophie rolled her eyes. They’d clearly played this game a lot.

“A refugee from Brunei, who’d have been tortured if he’d been deported.” Jennifer lifted her glass of Lambrini in a toast-like gesture. “Yours, Oliver?”

“A barman who stole from an employer who cheated him. Yours, Sophie?”

She mumbled something incoherent.

“What was that? We didn’t hear you.”